As not much is known about the risk factors for sporadic CJD, we are sequencing the exomes (coding portion of the genome) of ~250 sCJD patients. We plan to utilize specialized analysis programs and techniques to perform case-control analyses as well as look for associations with rare variants and copy-number variants and disease status. We will also compare these results with those of other neurodegenerative diseases to look for potential overlap with the neurodegeneration process more generally. For this last step we will make use of the thousands of Alzheimer Disease, frontotemporal dementia and Parkinson Disease samples currently available to us here at Washington University. We hope to use this as pilot data to get additional funding to sequence ~4,000 more samples available to us through our collaboration with the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center.
Dr. Ferreira received her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. Currently she works as a postdoctoral fellow at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, NIH. She has devoted her career to investigate new therapies to treat prion diseases and more recently, she is also interested in developing diagnostic tools to detect neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer and prion diseases at early stages of disease, where therapeutic intervention is more likely to be successful.
Contributed by: The Families of the CJD Foundation
Funds raised by the annual Strides for CJD run/walk have been applied to research grants awarded since 2016.
Contributed by: Sandra (Cookie) Stivison
Established in 2015.
Contributed by: The Jeffrey and Mary Smith Family Foundation; Zoë Smith Jaye and Jenny Smith Unruh; and Mary Smith
Established in 2015.
Contributed by: The Families of the CJD Foundation
Funds donated by supporters of the CJD Foundation have been applied to research grants awarded since 2009.
This website was made possible by a generous donation from Cookie Stivison, in memory of her husband Tom Stivison, and a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
